Putting Pastoral Vision Through the Meat Grinder

It is good to pull away for an intense period of theological study and personal reflection.  OR, is it?

A bit more than half way through my second Doctor of Ministry seminar at Beeson Divinity School, I am not sure of the answer  to that.  This much I do know:  I do believe that I will come out a more excellent follower of my Lord on the other side.  But the process of getting there is like going through a meat grinder:  all of my theological parts and my psychological self being processed slowly and intensely by an amazing work of the Holy Spirit.  I hope that I make for some terrific gourmet hamburger when it is all said and done!

This has not been a week of colliding interests for me.  More than a year ago, I tossed aside all of the secular books on leadership that I had ever purchased.  Mark Nysewander, a definate spiritual mentor for me, confirmed my decision to do so and encouraged me, over breakfast at Bob Evan’s one morning, to pursue Biblical leadership at the guidance of the Holy Spirit.  This seminar with Doug Webster has been a further grinding in the same direction for me.

The impetus placed on pastoral visioneering has been much on my mind this week.  The primary role of the pastor is not visioneering.  This is, I realize, tantamount to heresy given today’s business-model approach to Christian leadership. 

The leadership gurus will be quick to quote scripture.  Proverb 29.18 tells us that “where there is no prophetic vision the people cast off restraint” (ESV).  What is forgotten is the next line in the proverb:  “but blessed is he who keeps the law.”  The vision is clearly linked with the law and the law is linked not with modern notions of ecclesiastical success (read church growth here), but with a community that is rooted in keeping God’s law, thus living as a distinct witness to the goodness of God’s “already and yet still to come” kingdom in the midst of a world where cheap imitations of Kingdom goodness seem to abound.  It is interesting that the English Standard Version emphasizes “prophetic vision”.  Are not the prophetic visions of scripture calls for the people of Israel to again make themselves distinct from the rest of the world by their loving fidelity to God’s word, consequently becoming a light to the Gentiles?

There is Sinai.  Moses came down with the tablets revealing the law and God’s vision for a set-apart community of people who would be a light to the surrounding people.  Can the Pastor improve on that vision?  Is there a vision more unique than that vision?  Is any local church to have a vision distinct from the vision given to Israel?  If we learn the secular techniques, then practice them and emerge from our “mountains” with our own unique vision, are we any different than the community of God fashioning their golden calf and serving their own vision at Sinai’s feet?  Do we then serve a vision not really so unique or Kingdom-oriented because it is so similar to the visions of our pagan neighbors (read Fortune 500 companies, here)?

There are other Old Testament mountains where God makes his vision clear:  Moriah, Carmel, and Horeb, to name a few.  There are visionary mounts in the New Testament, too:  the mountain of the Sermon and the mountain of transfiguration, for example.  But for brevity sake, I will mention two others here.

There is the Mount of Golgotha where Jesus said that “it (think your sin met by his redemption) is finished”, done, made complete (John 19.28).  As a pastor, it is not my goal to take people to some visionary mountain where they achieve a success that looks like the success lauded by the world.  Rather, I want people to go with me to Golgotha to hear Jesus speaking redemption words over them and to wrestle with a vision of a suffering God, suffering for my sins and calling me to also suffer for the sake of his glory and his creation.

There is the nameless mount in Galilee where Jesus appears in his resurrection power to his disiples and casts this vision:  “Go, therefore, and make disciples”.  Can any statement I engineer take the place of this vision?  Can I hope to improve on the motivational power of the resurrection words of Jesus for his followers?  If I try to improve upon this vision or engineer it more specifically for a particular community, can it retain its globe-encompassing mission, or its situation specific implications for individual believers?

My answer to all of these questions is a resounding ”no”.  I have no mountains of my own from which to emerge with a grand vision for Great Commission Fellowship.  I have no grand visions – at least none that I will allow to masquerade in the place of God’s visions for his people.  But I would be glad to go with you to the Lord’s Mountains and refresh ourselves in the grandeur of these visions of the Most High!

Will we perish without such a church-specific vision cast with the fervor of a motivational guru in an infomercial?  The Proverb is instructive:  blessed are those who keep the law!

A Tension-Hymn

One of the theses of the course I am in this week at Beeson Divinity School (with Dr. Doug Webster) is this:  spiritual growth arises from tension.  I’ll unpack that a bit more at another time.

But this evening, as I was praying through the Divine Hours liturgy for today’s Vespers, a hymn (that I have never heard) caught my attention and seemed worth sharing.  You will get some idea of the tensions involved in Christian obedience and Christian spiritual formation from the words of this hymn.

You, Lord, Are Both Lamb and Shepherd

You, Lord are both lamb and shepherd / You Lord are both prince and slave / You, peace-maker and sword-bringer / Of the way you took and gave. / You, the everlasting instant / You whom we both scorn and crave.

You, who walk each day beside us, / Sit in power at God’s side / You who preach a way that’s narrow, / Have a love that reaches wide. / You, the everlasting instant / You who are our pilgrim guide.

Clothed in light upon the mountain / Stripped of might upon the cross / Shining in eternal glory / Beggared by a soldier’s toss. / You, the everlasting instant / You who are our gift and cost.

Worthy is our earthly Jesus / Worthy is our cosmic Christ / Worthy your defeat and victory / Worthy still your peace and strife / You, the everlasting instant / You who are our death and life.

Missing Out When we Miss Out on Church

Last week, I recommended the book Death By Suburb by David Goetz.  As a Pastor, I really resonated with his chapter titled “Lashed Down.”  Goetz makes the case that much of our spiritual growth is stunted because we run from the community of the local church when it gets mundane or difficult or frustrating.  As more and more people hold the local church to ever-higher standards (that I’m not sure God ever intended to actually live up to on this side of eternity) and equate quiet walks in the woods with the corporate worship of the church, Goetz’s thought is all the more important!

 A few quotes . . .

 “Freedom does not always mean going.  In the thicker life, in fact, freedom often means staying.  That’s certainly true of the Christian understanding of marriage.  Staying with one partner over a lifetime opens me up to the goodness of God in a way that serial monogamy doesn’t.  Church is another place where freedom means staying. . . With both church and marriage, I stay rooted in community, because only in a place where I’m free not to leave can I find the “personal” in the so-called personal relationship with God.  This sixth practice (staying put in your church) is all about staying in relationships when everything inside of me screams to pack up my hurt feelings and find a more ideal community.”

 “Church migration patterns tend to follow whatever church has the buzz – the “more biblical” preacher, the newer, more authentic service with the riveting young pastor who weaves stories using live animals as props and uses technology innovatively; the nuevo liturgical service; the burgeoning youth ministry with the exotic mission trips.  There’s nothing like momentum, when your church is the one that is attracting new attendees.  There’s nothing worse than seeing your friends leave your church for another only a mile or so away.”

 “The religious hoi-polloi seem restless, always looking for the next worship conquest.  Often the anxiety is couched in terms of life change:  “Our oldest is now a senior, and she’ll be headed to college in the fall.  We just need a place that ministers to me and my husband for a change.”  “We’re really tired of worship choruses and casual Protestantism.  We want a church that is steeped in mystery and transcendence.”  “We need a church that is a healing place.” . . . And of course, there are always the theological reasons:  “The church is headed in a direction that is not biblical.”

A Feeble – but apt – Picture of Heaven

A few people this past week made reference to the closing section of Sunday’s sermon. I closed the series on the Apostle’s Creed with a section on the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting. Here’s that section:

Theologian J.I. Packer suggests that heaven may not be tilted toward either of those extremes. Eternity is probably not an everlasting classical harp concert any more than it is an everlasting orgy. Packer says this about life in the kingdom of heaven:

What was said to the child (about heaven) – “If you want sweets and hamsters in heaven, they’ll be theer”’ – was not an evasion (of the question), but a witness to the truth that in heaven no felt needs or longings go unsatisfied. What our wants will actually be, however, we hardly know, save that first and foremost we shall ‘always want to be with the Lord’ (I Thessalonians 4.17).

Packer also says this:

What will be do in heaven? Not lounge around, but worship, work, think and communicate, enjoying activity, beauty, people and God. First and foremost, however, we shall see and love Jesus, our Savior, Master and Friend.

In other words, we will eternally grace the new creation in the same way that God intended us to grace this creation in the very beginning. We will love God, because each one of us was created to walk with him. We will work because each of us was created to tend to and care for the creation. We will think grander thoughts of greater purity and capacity than any thoughts humanity has yet to think. We will communicate with each other in a harmony that is free of anger and jealousy and “come-uppances”. We will enjoy activity and beauty and other people for we were made to walk hand-in-hand with one another in the open-sun of the meadows and beneath the shade of the trees, to enjoy the songs of the birds, to lie down with both the lion and the lamb for naps in the cool of the afternoon. And best of all, we were made to see him with our eyes, to hear him with our ears, to touch him with our hands and to be held in the embrace of Jesus everlastingly.

Feeble though these words may be in their descriptive power of eternity, this is something of what it will mean to be resurrected in the body and to live everlastingly; to become the finishing touches that God designed you and me to be on that sixth day so very long ago. We believe in finishing touches: the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting.

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Packer, J.I., Affirming the Apostle’s Creed. Crossway Books: 2008. pp. 146-147

Unlikely Home-Schoolers

We are unlikely home-schoolers and yet that is what we will be this fall.

We are “unlikely” for several reasons.

First, we have long believed our kids – as followers of Jesus – need to know how to live apologetically within an increasingly non-Christian culture; including the public schools.  Second, we have long believed that the public schools were a unique place for Christian kids and churches to creatively enter into ministry.  (I still believe this!)Third, we have loved and appreciated many of our children’s teachers and school administrators.  Fourth, we have family and friends who are teachers in the public schools.  If there were more teachers like them and they actually had some influence over the system, our kids would be in much better shape to face the challenges of the world.

And yet, here we are preparing to begin home-schooling in the Fall.  A few reasons why . . .

Number One (and most important for us):  The Curriculum is no longer well-rounded. It is deficient in the liberal arts; particularly in history and classical literature .

NUMBER TWO:  Standardized Tests now shape the curriculum toward reading, mathematics and somewhat toward science.  This emphasis on testing was bad before President Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act but now it is etrocious.  Rather than improving our schools, these tests have oriented the entire system toward an LCD (the Lowest Common Denominator).  Teachers are now forced to follow a curriculum that seeks to move the most educationally challenged child in the classroom toward a passing score on these standardized tests.  There is a huge gap between a “passing score” and actually helping a child achieve his or her real potential.

NUMBER THREE:  We have developed a “progressive” philosophy of education.  Because this philosophy is biased against western thinking (and masquerades under the title of “world-view neutral”), our children learn more about the faults and failures of the great western thinkers than they do their significant contributions to society and culture.  Western failures should be held in tandem with contributions. 

NUMBER FOUR:  The idea of local control of the public schools is a fallacy.  The system has been maneuvered to give the appearance of local control through site based decision making councils and school boards and PTO’s, but the real control is in Frankfort and Washington DC where the bureaucrats (who do not know our communities or their children or their teachers) hold the purse strings.

And so, this fall begins a great new journey for us.  Best of all has been the excitement in our kid’s eyes whenever they talk about going to school at home.  They are eager to spend more time with their parents and we are eager to do the same with them.  The Psalmist was right!  Children are a blessing and a reward from God.

Is Jesus into Identity Theft?

I had my plans for the week all laid out.  They included, as normal, spending the first couple of hours of Monday morning getting myself grounded for the week’s work on my teaching for the coming Sunday.  I also needed to pay my bill for my July seminar for my Doctor of Ministry degree.  When I checked my bank account before paying the bill, I discovered that about two thousand dollars (the money I was saving for my seminar) had been taken from my bank account and spent in businesses in Katmandhu, Nepal, of all places.

It took a couple of hours, but the bank finally got it figured out and the funds should be back in my account by Wednesday or Thursday and then I can pay the bill for my class.

This is the first time I have been a victim of anything remotely similar to identify theft.  According to Javelin Research, about 10 million Americans had their identity stolen in 2008.  One in ten Americans have already had their identity stolen and about 1.6 million families experienced financial fraud not related to their credit cards.  That means that identity theft can – more likely WILL – happen to just about all of us at some time or another.

Thinking that someone has access to all of your personal information is really freaky.  Kyra and I were both sick at our stomachs – on the verge of throwing up – until the matter was resolved.

Throughout the New Testament, Paul speaks of Christians as being “in” Christ or “with” Christ.  His idea is that all that we are is consumed by the identity of Christ.  Does this mean that Jesus is into identity theft?  Does Jesus want to ruin who you are so that he can then use you according to his plans and his purposes?  Does Jesus steal your identity and then use you according to his own whims and fancies?

In one sense, I suppose that we could say that he does.  We are, as 2 Corinthians 5.17 tells us, “new creations”.

But Jesus is not about stealing our identities.  Jesus is about fulfilling our identities.  Jeremiah and a few of the Psalms remind us that were known by God before our mothers gave us birth and that God was knitting us together in our mother’s wombs.  That means that Jesus does not destroy what we are as if it is useless or has no value.  It means that God’s purpose in Jesus is to restore what has been marred by the powers of evil and sin, so that we can then fulfill all that God intended for us.

LifeLock is the # 1 provider of identity protection in the United States.  Kyra and I will be customers by the end of the week!  LifeLock, in describing their services, says this:  “LifeLock helps protect your identity – even if your information falls into the wrong hands.  We provide you early notification of identity threats . . .”

This is, in a few short words, what Jesus does.  Jesus protects and restores our God-given identity and his Holy Spirit gives us warnings of potential thefts or disruptions to the restoration of our God-given identity.  Satan is the real identity thief.  As Jesus says, “the thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy.”  The Good Shepherd, on the other hand, calls his sheep by name, he leads them, he protects them, he lays his life down for them.

Someone in Nepal may momentarily have some of my money, but Jesus is fulfilling my God-given identity and it is much harder for any thief to take that away.

Reflections on a Good Life

These are my reflections on my Pawpee’s life that I shared as my eulogy to him at his funeral last Monday.  I based it on Galatians 5.22; the fruits of the Spirit passage.  He was, except for my own Dad, the best man I ever knew and he really shaped and influenced my life in his own quiet way.

I wondered last week about the first time that Pawpee put his hands into the dirt.

It must have been somewhere in Willowton Hollow. The youngest of the Jones boys – at two or three years old – pulling earthworms from the soil or making mud-pies or maybe squishing the mud around the rain barrel that provided the family’s water through his fingers or toes. Whenever or wherever it happened, anyone who knew Giles Edward Jones, either as Josh, or Daddy or Pawpee, knows that the feel of the soil in his hands struck a God-given heart-chord that followed him for the rest of his life. The same chord must have sounded in Adam’s heart when he put his hands into Eden‘s soil and God told him to take care of it.

Pawpee loved putting things in the dirt. If he was not in his chair at the kitchen table or his recliner in the living room he was no more at home anywhere else than when he was mowing his lawn, pruning his azaleas, marveling at his rhododendrons or raising a mess of green beans, corn, potatoes, cucumbers and tomatoes, to feed the army that piled into his kitchen every Sunday at about lunchtime.

That army at the kitchen table was the other thing that Pawpee spent so much time growing and raising up. This garden, of flesh and blood creatures, comprising children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren, was his pride and his joy and he looked at us as if were, without a dbout, his most significant contribution to God’s creation.

Pawpee, to my recollection, never talked about his faith. I could not tell you of his favorite hymn, or his favorite Bible passage, and I can’t tell you when he gave his life to Christ or how that moment unfolded for him. I seem to recall that it had something to do with Pawpee Shannon telling him that any man who was going to marry one of his daughters would have to be a church-going man. In an age where Christians talk about their faith, and perhaps do way too much of it, Pawpee was a breath of fresh air. He did not have to open his mouth to convince anyone that he was a man of faith. To watch his life and to experience time with him was to know, without him having to tell you about it, that God had done and was doing something significant in his heart.

When considering the sheer quality of Pawpee’s life, I I believe that we can say with certainty that God was the gardener of his heart. We know this because God‘s fruits were on such full display in Pawpee‘s life.

Pawpee, for example, had self-control. His clothes were always reasonable and practical. He bought his cars out of necessity; never out of want. He lived in the same home for 50 years. His things had their assigned place and events had their assigned seasons. His self-control only seemed to be in short-supply when he was bidding farewell to any of us who lived more than an hour or two away. But perhaps those tears were less the result of a lack of self-control and more the result of an abundance of some of the fruits of the Spirit in his heart.

There was gentleness. Now I know, from having heard the family legends, that Kenny and Gary occasionally experienced the heavier side of Pawpee’s hand when they were boys, but his touch was almost always easy, his hugs were always strong and his words, even when they were scolding, were lovingly corrective and seldom harsh.

God had raised up whole crops of kindness and goodness and faithfulness in Pawpee’s heart. When any of us were in trouble, he was there for us whether he approved or disapproved of the decisions that had gotten us into the trouble. When we wept, he wept. When we laughed, he laughed. And if he could help us in any way he never hesitated to do it and yet he was wise enough to never bail us out of anything.

Last Friday, when Dona came by the house, she noted how much Pawpee loved his church. He was so faithful to Kee Street. Whenever we talked on the phone, he told me that he was going off with John Puckett or “Murph” to fix this or that at the church or in the home of a widow who attended the church. And if the gifts of faithfulness could be measured in brown beans, then Giles Jones indeed left Kee Street UMC a very wealthy congregation!

Pawpee had peace and patience. This is not to say that he did not worry and was never impatient. But when he did worry, it was not a frantic worry that flowed from his desire to control a situation. His worries came from that place in his heart where he wanted only the best for the people and the places that he loved. And his impatience was never for material things. He grew most impatient when something good or well-deserved seemed to be with held from the people or the places that he loved.

Perhaps he learned patience as an avid WVU fan. He was always waiting for them to win a national football or basketball championship.  When they beat Kentucky this year, he called me as soon as the game was over to ask if I would like him to mail back the UK baseball cap we had given him for Christmas. “No Pawpee, why don’t you just send me a WVU cap instead?” I asked.

God grew joy in Pawpee’s heart. Did you ever see that gleam in his eye? It was there, never brighter than at Sunday dinner or Holiday gatherings or when one of the great grandchildren would come pouncing through his front door, or were laid gently in his lap in the recliner.  Sydney, in her own grieving last night, said to me, “Daddy, Pawpee was always so jolly and always smiling at me and he never got upset when we messed up his house.”

We learn from Pawpee that joy and happiness are indeed two different things. You can get drunk and be happy. You can open a gift and be happy. You can buy a home or a car and be happy, but those things don’t bring joy. Pawpee taught us that joy, unlike happiness, is a lasting commodity because it goes to the core of the heart and it is found in a lifetime of giving yourself to the people and the places that you love.

And then there is love itself. Love comes first when Paul lists the fruits of God’s garden in the human heart, but I saved it for last because there was a love that God grew in Pawpee’s heart for a woman that was of the purest and most amazing quality. Those of us who came into this world as a result of it know that we were indeed blessed to be given witness to it.

Many of us had noted that there had been a glint of sadness in Pawpee’s eyes for these three and a half years since Meemaw had gone. But it dawned on me Friday that it wasn’t sadness at all. It was longing. Sadness, you see, comes on us when all seems lost and all seems to be at and end. Longing is not like sadness because longing comes upon us when we know that something is going to be made complete, but we are not yet living in that completion.

And so it was love’s longing in Pawpee’s eyes for these three and a half years; not sadness. He never doubted that he would someday be united again with Betty Ann Shannon Jones, the great love his life, but he knew every day with stark clarity that he wasn’t there just yet. Some time early on Thursday morning that longing passed from his eyes and things for Pawpee became complete once again.

Meemaw and Pawpee once demonstrated the jitter bug in the middle of their living room for Kyra and I when we were first married. Would you ever have guessed that the jitterbug was heaven‘s dance today?

John Ortberg and a Church’s Most Impotant Vision

Leadership Journal is not one of my favorite magazines, but last Wednesday it nailed me just where I needed to be nailed (Spring Edition, 2010).

It was a day of frustration.  I was wondering about lots of things.

Why is our building project coming along so slowly?

Why are our worship numbers not growing now (after 8 months of extraordinary growth in 2009?

Why is it so hard to get people to commit to discipleship (beyond Sunday morning worship)?

Why don’t more people volunteer for the nursery?

On and on the list went.  We know its not healthy, but any honest Pastor will tell you that we all have days like this.  Days when we wonder what we are doing and why we are doing it and if it really makes any difference?

None of this was helped by some of the reading I’m doing for our parenting sermon series.  Apparently one of the difficulties with adolescence and the teenage years is that parents hit midlife at about the same time and they face their own identity crisis and have to deal with goals they set in their 20′s that may have gone unaccomplished by the time they are in their late 40′s and 50′s.  I’m a long way from mid-life, but I started to wonder about my goals and accomplishments anyway and what kind of progress I’m making.

Enter Leadership Journal and an article by John Ortberg, one of my favorite pastors and authors.

Ortberg discusses the necessity of vision as it relates to the maturity of the body (the church), but as he says, he’s probably not talking about “the kind of vision you’re thinking about.”

The most important vision, as Ortberg articulates, is not the church’s vision for its programs or ministries or its future, but its vision of God.

Here’s the paragraph that really got me:

The number one “vision problem” with churches today is not (as is widely held) leaders who “lack a vision.”  The real problem is when our primary focus shifts from who God is (a vision that alone can lead to the peace of Christ reigning in our hearts) to what we are doing.

He then goes on to suggest a few ways to diagnose this “mission-replacing-vision sickness”.

• People in leadership feel constant pressure and inadequacy.
• Goals, numbers and techniques replace the goodness of God as the most frequent topics of thought and conversation.
• Leaders view themselves as constantly having to motivate and hype and whip up enthusiasm in the church for doing and giving.  You will sometimes hear people say “vision leaks”; a more accurate statement is that “mission leaks” when it has replaced the vision of God as people’s dominant inner reality.
• People’s sense of esteem or excitement depends on “how church is going.”
• A church’s identity gets rooted in its success.

Ortberg concludes this section of his article with this statement:  “The vision of God is not a tool leaders can use to get the church to function better.  It is freedom from the need to perform for the whole church – beginning with leaders.”

Does Christian “Parenting” Work?

We’ll continue this Sunday with the second in our two part series of teachings on Parenting.  Below are some quotes from Tim Kimmel’s book Grace Based Parenting:  Set Your Family Free that have been on my mind today.

“The painful reality is that too many parents would rather feel good than do good.”

“Since how children turn out is far more contingent on what is going on inside them than outside them, unnecessarily tight boundaries undermine the desire of the Holy Spirit, who is working to build a sense of moral resolve in their hearts.”

“The real test of a parenting model is how well equipped the children are to move into adulthood as vital members of the human race.”

“We need to have kids that can be sent off to the most hostile universities, toil in the greediest work environments, and raise their families in the most hedonistic communities and yet not be the least bit intimidated by their surroundings.  Furthermore, they need to be engaged in the lives of people in their culture; gracefully representing Christ’s love inside these despearate surroundings.”

“Are we, as an entire group, known for sending out children from our homes who are not easily snookered by the corrupted world around them?  It doesn’t appear that we are.”

“There was one fortress that he (Satan) had a difficult time penetrating:  a good, solid family.  Parents armed with little more than a vibrant relationship with God consistently served as the ideal springboard for great people.  So something changed.  We got scared.  and I think that fear is waht motivates so much of the Christian parenting advice we get.”

Sophistication and the Widow Gibson

Last Tuesday, I went hiking at the Civil War battlefield at Perryville, Kentucky.   As a history buff, it is one of my favorite local places to hike.

As I was walking up and then cresting the ridge that gives view to the location of what was once “the widow Gibson’s cabin” I was struck by the possible nature of faith in Kentucky’s 19th century countryside.

I do not recall ever seeing a picture of the Widow Gibson on any of the markers at Perryville, but in my mind’s eye, I could imagine her living alone in her cabin with her nearest neighbors a few ridge’s away.

When she walked through the fields and saw the little purple wildflowers silouetted against the larger yellow buds of another bloom growing wild in nature, did she fret over global warming and the appropriate Christian response to the supposed demise of the environment?

When she thought of God, did she ponder the mystery of the Trinity?

If she ever took Communion was she riddled by the exact presence of God in the sacrament (or the ordinance) as the case may have been?

Was she forced to compromise her Christian ethics to accomodate the paltry entertainment offered up on her television screen?

Did she have to search the bookstore to find the best translation or the best Study Bible; only to find that someone would then insult the legitimacy of that translation or the author of the study notes?

Did she even know that the Bible was initially written in Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek and would it have made any difference?

Maybe she was embroiled in some sort of controversy about whether or not worship was best played and performed with regular notation or shape notes? (contemporary vs. traditional)

Maybe she  was busy trying to figure out whether she was a premillenialist, a postmillenialist or an a-millenialist?

Maybe she wished that she could come up with the money to attend a Christian conference for reviving her spirit?

Or maybe, as scary as it sounds in our current information-saturated, theologically-sophisticated Christian culture, that the Widow Gibson, if indeed she was a Christian at all, was satisfied simply to know Jesus and to have him walk with her and talk with her as she farmed her crops, chopped her wood, cooked her food and walked her ridges.

Maybe our supposed sophistication – rather than making us closer to our Lord – chokes the very life out of our faith and impedes the very relationship we think it will enhance!

Maybe following Jesus is not as sophisticated a task or challenge as we presume?